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To chime in as the Melvin photographer... All photos have to be post-processed. The data captured by the sensor is not in a format that today's display devices can use. If you could see the RAW image, it would look flat and washed out. Contrast, saturation, sharpness, etc. must all be adjusted to have that RAW image look "correct." Some people choose to do this themselves using Lightroom, Photoshop, or what have you. Other people just set their camera to output .jpg and let the camera make all the decisions for them which is an educated guess at best.

Would I be correct in assuming that cameras don't capture images in the same way the human eye does as well and that some of that post-processing is to make it look more like something your eyes would capture?

That's certainly true. One great example is HDR which is another topic that most people (including photographers) don't have a handle on. If you've ever tried to take a photo of a sunset at the beach, you probably ended up with either a nice photo of a sky and silhouetted/dark foreground or a well-exposed foreground and a sky too bright to see any of the colors in. That's the way the camera saw it because it can only capture a certain range of light to dark, but I've never seen people stumbling around in the dark enjoying the sunset sky.

Enter, HDR - High Dynamic Range. You can take a well exposed shot of the sky and a well exposed shot of the foreground and when you put them together you get a shot that looks the way you saw and remember it.

An important side note... When you hear someone complaining about HDR being too saturated and not real and blah blah blah, you can safely assume they don't what they're talking about. What they're really complaining about (and apparently don't understand the difference) is Tone Mapping. Tone Mapping is the process of blending those multiple shots together into a finished HDR image. It's possible and quite easy to blend them in a way that looks like clown vomit, but with practice it's a tool to overcome your camera's limitations.

Your brain does heaps of processing on the images your eyes capture (stacking, filling in gaps, 3D, saturation, etc.) To take better photos you need to visualize in the way the camera sees - small range of light to dark, 2D, etc.

Thanks! No, I will start checking that out. I've wanted to take photography seriously for a while now. I'm just worried that I'll turn into one of those typical photography acolytes that take a picture of every menial object in existence. Relevant

Salar de Uyuni (or Salar de Tunupa) is the world's largest salt flat at 10,582 square kilometers (4,086 sq mi). It is located in the Potosí and Oruro departments in southwest Bolivia, near the crest of the Andes

If you live in the US, you can head out to the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. As a bonus, there's no speed limit so you can drive fast as your car will allow there... probably not after it rains tho. There were wet spots there when I went.

Our driver was munching on these green things through the journey. It was only after we left that we discovered that he was chewing on coca leaves the whole time which isn't terribly uncommon in Bolivia.

It's common in most of the continent, it's use has a long history with those people. Today, it's pretty common to see it sold by the bagful on streets and in markets in most places down there. Chewing it is a bit "working-class" for most, and it's popular as a mate/tea. The "buzz" you get from it feels like drinking a caffeinated soda, but it does work well as an appetite-suppressant. The Spanish actually encouraged it's use because they could drive those indigenous slaves harder without having to feed them as much.

I tried it when we were in Peru, it honestly didn't give me a buzz or high at all, you have to remember that cocaine is a highly processed form of the plant, and you'd have to ingest a TONNE of the raw form to actually get any meaningful amount of the stimulant. People use it there mainly to calm their stomach (especially the tea) and it apparently helps with altitude sickness.

If you don't take it with the "catalizador" (bicarbonate of sodium for example, or those white sticks you can buy at the markets, although I don't know what they're made from) you really won't get any effect.

What's awesome about it is that the ground is covered in weird hexagonal shapes for most of the salt flats.

As for the rain, it depends - we were there when the water was deeper than this and went through it no problem. There are limits where the jeeps can go, but there are paths through it even when the water's pretty deep.

From a photographers point of view it is difficult enough to get a good photo of it. The extreme brightness confuses the camera and you usually get exposure errors. In most photos I have seen of it, the photo is underexposed and the white clouds grey.

I realize people are using the word "jeep" as a generic to describe this vehicle but I'm curious what kind of vehicle it really is - I believe it's either a Nissan Patrol or (my #1 guess) a Toyota Land Cruiser FJ80 with ambulance doors. Any thoughts?

Fix the fucking horizon for the love of god. Please fix it. This is like nails being dragged down the soul of any professional photographer. You have your exposure, composition and use of a polarizing filter spot on. Now. Fix. The. Horizon.

I always thought one of the funniest sights was the on the drive west from Salt Lake City on Interstate 80. As you traverse various salt flats you see the tire tracks in the salt where someone decided the call of adventure and dreams of breaking the records from Bonneville was too great. Then you see the tire tracks getting deeper and deeper as they slowly sank into the salt. About 50 yards out you see the tracks stop where they reach about a foot deep. Next to them you see much bigger tire tracks and then a set of double tracks coming back out (tow truck). There were probably 8 - 12 variations on this theme across the Utah desert.